I usually take my time with my current reads, but I devoured this book in two days because I just wanted to get the pain over and done with. I finished reading An American Marriage yesterday. An American Marriage is a masterpiece of storytelling, an intimate look into the souls of people who must reckon with the past while moving forward- with hope and pain- into the future ◊◊ Review – ★★★★★ (5 stars) This stirring love story is a deeply insightful look into the hearts and minds of three people who are at once bound and separated by forces beyond their control. After five years, Roy’s conviction is suddenly overturned, and he returns to Atlanta ready to resume their life together. As Roy’s time in prison passes, she is unable to hold on to the love that has been her center. Though fiercely independent, Celestial finds herself bereft and unmoored, taking comfort in Andre, her childhood friend, and best man at their wedding. Roy is arrested and sentenced to twelve years for a crime Celestial knows he didn’t commit. They are settling into the routine of their life together, when they are ripped apart by circumstances neither could have imagined. He is a young executive and she is artist on the brink of an exciting career. Burlingame’s two-volume, prize-winning “Abraham Lincoln: A Life,” under “Lincoln, Abraham-Marriage and Domestic Life-relations with MTL” can be found the subentries “bad temper,” “ ‘home was hell’ ” and “not a good cook or hostess.” Now this provocative, compulsively readable book sets out to demonstrate that Abraham Lincoln’s sorrows-often attributed to the challenge of leading the nation through civil war-must be ascribed also to the horror of his domestic life.Newlyweds, Celestial and Roy, are the embodiment of both the American Dream and the New South. She was a fool, a shrew, a she-devil, a hellion and a hyena. She was, according to a panoply of people who interacted with her, cold, coarse, savage, repulsive and brutal. In “An American Marriage: The Untold Story of Abraham Lincoln and Mary Todd,” the eminent Lincoln scholar Michael Burlingame has amassed an avalanche of insults directed at Mary Lincoln.

From around the world, condolence letters flooded the White House, but such outpourings of sympathy proved short-lived deviations from all that had come before and all that would come after. Those words were uttered time and again after the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln in 1865, as mourners expressed pity for the woman who had seen her husband murdered before her eyes.

An american marriage book review